Doesn’t Y Go Back Anymore? I Mean Triangle

My Xbox 360 isn’t happy. It has had to budge up. It’s been lording it over the puny Wii for ages, sat there on the top TV stand shelf, surrounded by glorious space. The Wii has been looking up, shaking its tiny glossy white fist at the 360, relegated as it is to the bottom shelf. Sometimes you catch the Wii trying to angrily pulse with its gentle blue light, wedged between the incompetent Freeview recorder and a piece of stilton that I’m growing.

But, those days are over. The blue cheese-flecked Wii is basking in relative glory on the bottom shelf now. Above it, the 360 is now poking precariously off the edge of the shelf to allow space for a new arrival. A new arrival that takes severe liberties with the title “Slim”.

Yes. I finally have a Sony PlayStation 3.

Before you all turn up trying to burglarise me, note that the stilton is now sentient and grows in strength each day.

So, it’s been 10 days since I welcomed the sleek, slender… no I can’t do it. The PS3 is immense. I killed four dogs walking down the high street with it in a bag, swinging it gaily. It knocked a bus over when I turned around too fast. It took eight of us to lift it onto the shelf. The weakest is now in a coma.

I’ve wanted one all along, but it’s only now that the pricing has lowered enough that I’ve taken the plunge. PlayStations were my main consoles for 10 years, but I jumped ship to the Xbox 360 because it simply offered far better value than Sony’s offering. At the time, there was around £150 price difference between the two consoles, which happens to be the price of a nearly-new Wii and a decent-sized chunk of stilton.

So, what have I got up to with my PS3 since it came into my life? The first couple of hours were spent downloading updates, wondering why I didn’t have a TV icon on the Media Bar, then restarting and finally receiving the glorious ecstatic release of the TV icon and the 4oD, ITV Player and BBC iPlayer functionality therein. Next stop?

Home.

I remember reading about Sony’s plans for Home a few years ago, and thinking, “Damn, that’s going to be amazing, I’m really going to miss out”. Well, go figure. All I was missing was a brief, confusing wander around a virtual settlement that’s so subtly unsettling that it gives Silent Hill a run for its money.

That out of the way, I tried the web browser. Then I looked down at my iPhone, and back at the TV, and back at the iPhone, and back at the TV, then back to the iPhone and then the stilton caught my eye and I stared at it for 17 minutes.

Next I checked the PlayStation Store. This is more like it. WipEout HD – I’m on board. Then I spotted the back catalogue of classic PlayStation games, available in most cases for a nominal fee, and I had a nostalgia-gasm. The idea of having stonewall classics like the original Metal Gear Solid, G-Police, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX always sat waiting on the hard drive was an unbearably pleasant one.

Wait… what? There was a Final Fantasy IX?! It was about the childhood of Zinedine Zidane you say? Sounds brilliant, sign me up.

Later that first day, I headed to the local video rental proprietor to purchase Inception on Blu-Ray. I was suitably impressed. In HD, you can make out the consternation on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s brow more vividly than ever as he watches Leonardo Di Caprio make up the plot as he goes along. Worth the extra few pounds.

It was a while before I actually played a game on my PS3. First one was Little Big Planet. I enjoy most things that feature Stephen Fry, especially when he repeatedly says the word “Sackboy” so very sweetly. It’s good clean fun. I was looking forward to finally adding it to my collection and it has lived up to my expectations. I played it with a lady I know who is sometimes in the flat when I am, and we richly enjoyed it. Even the stilton cracked a smile. Although something black with quite a few legs crawled out and ran under the sofa when it did so that was regrettable.

A lasting impression from the PS3 exclusives I’ve seen over the years is the polish. Little Big Planet takes you by the hand and exudes a constant sense of quality design in every facet. Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain are other great examples of this. And now they’re all at my fingertips, which is genuinely exciting.

Seeing as how I’m now effectively involved in two console gaming communities, obviously that means I need to purchase multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Black Ops and FIFA 11 twice. The lady I know who is sometimes in the flat when I am did, admittedly, find this a little perplexing. Thankfully I couldn’t hear her protests because I was being pwned by noobs on a whole new console. Loudly.

It’s odd. I’d never have imagined back when I did most of my gaming on the PS2 that one day I wouldn’t be used to the control pads, but when it comes to FPS games, it took some getting back into the groove. I still find it lacks the precision I can get out of the 360 pad when aiming, but I forgive the DualShock 3 because it’s pretty and familiar and it doesn’t display those sodding flashing green quadrants as soon as it’s below 90% battery life.

Plus, every time I see it resting on the arm of the sofa I remember.

I remember that, soon, I’m finally going to be playing Metal Gear Solid 4. A game that I’ve never played before. I’ve been saving it. Just like I was saving the stilton. The stilton came back to bite me in the arse though. Literally. It caned.